Installing Custom Shapes and Brushes in Photoshop

Posted In Basics, Brushes, Photoshop | Author: David Leggett 11 Comments

If you’re new to Photoshop, you may not be familiar with installing new custom shapes or brushes. In this tutorial, I’ll show you the ropes so you can start using them straight away.

Brushes and Custom Shapes are both collections of design elements in Adobe Photoshop that can be used to enhance your graphics. There are hundreds of online resources that provide free downloads for each of these mentioned elements, but they won’t do you much good if you’re not sure how to start using them.

Installing Custom Shapes

To install a new Custom Shape you’ve downloaded, you’ll have to first select the Custom Shape Tool from the toolbar.

Custom Shape Tool

Now, from the Custom Shapes Options Bar, select the Custom Shape Picker dropdown. From here, you’ll be able to pick any of your currently installed custom shapes for use in your documents. However, right now we want to ignore all of these shapes, and instead click the arrow on the right side of the picker. From here, we want to “Load Shapes…“.

Load Shapes

Once you click this, a browser will be opened up for you. From the browser, just travel to the directory where you saved your custom shapes too, and load them from there. Your new shapes will be available in the Shape Picker afterwards.

Installing Brushes

Installing brushes takes essentially the same steps as installing custom shapes.

Select the Brush tool from the toolbar.

The Brush Tool

And now from the Options Bar, select the Brush Preset Picker dropdown menu, click the arrow off to the right, and then select Load Brushes…

Load Brushes

Again, just browse to the folder where your installed brushes are stored, and load them from there. You’re new brushes will be available in the Brush Preset Picker, as well as the Brushes window.

Need Help Installing Custom Layer Styles in Photoshop?

Hope this helps!

11 Comments

cruddpuppet December 10th, 2007
Quite basic, but I’ve seen many people with this question, so this should be of great help to others.
David Leggett December 10th, 2007
Yes, this is definitely one for those new to Photoshop. But everyone must start somewhere

Also, this tutorial was filed under the Photoshop > Basic category, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise
Steve Mathis January 1st, 2008
I remember when I first tried to do this I had an older version of photoshop…and had a heck of a time finding brushes for my older version hehe.
antonwoods March 24th, 2008
very well explained i had problems trying to do this back in the days aswell Steve hahaha
Photoshop brushes April 27th, 2008
i just double click on the brush file and it automatically installs them.
is this only a CS3 thing?
David Leggett April 27th, 2008
With versions of Photoshop prior to the Creative Suite 3, yes, it was required that you install them in this way.
cherry July 17th, 2008
Hello all,
I just started learn photoshop yesterday thru this usefull site. But i was wondering if my photoshop is the right version to learn from the very beginning. So i have Adobe photoshop 7.0
Please advice… Thanks